Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting
Website: eamonmcgivern.com
Éamon McGivern was born in 1990 and grew up in San Francisco at the height of the AIDS epidemic, an experience that has shaped much of his later work. He earned a BFA with honors in Painting from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, and an MA in Fine Arts from Chelsea College of Arts in London, spending a semester along the way at Musashino Art University in Tokyo studying traditional Japanese painting and printmaking. After several years in London, he returned to San Francisco in 2016 and immersed himself in the city’s DIY art scene, painting portraits of the queers, punks, and poets around him.
McGivern has since been an artist in residence at Root Division and the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Residency 11:11 in London, and the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles. He is a two-time recipient of the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Individual Artists Grant, which supported both his San Francisco Poets series (2019–2020) and Still Lives, a Trans Portrait Project (2022). His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Tenderloin Museum and the GLBT Historical Society Museum, both in San Francisco. Alongside his studio practice, McGivern works a day job as a front-line worker at a shelter for unhoused queer people, and describes his art-making, astrology practice, and work as a licensed massage therapist as inseparable parts of a single commitment to healing and community.
McGivern works in oil on canvas, in a warm, luminous figurative style rooted in traditional portraiture. His subjects are drawn from his own community — friends, lovers, and fellow artists — painted in unguarded, everyday moments: getting a haircut, smoking a cigarette, at ease at home or at the beach. The paintings are collaborative by design, developed together with their subjects, and favor tenderness and ordinariness over spectacle. Of Still Lives, a Trans Portrait Project, McGivern said the series “was initially intended as a testament to trans joy,” but became, in the finished paintings, “a collection of ordinary people living our lives under a regime that, when it allows us to live at all, works to exclude us from public life.”
In recent years his practice has turned toward archival material, incorporating photographs and ephemera from queer and trans elders’ private collections and institutional archives into new paintings that sit between historical document and present-day portrait. This body of work — shown as A/History — attempts to build intergenerational connection across the gaps in LGBTQ history left by the AIDS epidemic, transphobia, and political oppression, and to treat those histories, in the artist’s words, as “living memory, not archives.”
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
Claim this page → to update your own profile.